Friday, August 28, 2009

Vincent van Gogh is one of the most talented modern artists. Though he suffered from depression and insanity during his life, his art works are marvelous. The most famous among his works is The Starry Night painting. It tells so much of his life's despair and the hope that's left in him. Here are some of my sixth graders The Starry Night Painting!

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Henri Rousseau was a french post-impressionist painter in the naive and primitive manner. His best known paintings depict jungle scenes, even though he never really left France or saw a jungle. His inpirations came from illustrated books and the botanical gardens in Paris. He claimed to have invented a new genre of portrait landscape, which he achieved by starting a painting with a view such as a favorite part of the city, and then depicting a person in the foreground.

Some of Henri Rousseau's paintings are:The Snake Charmer (1907)

The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope (1905)

The Sleeping Gypsy

I presented a short background information for my students before I made them draw. Since Henri Rousseau's works ussually showed the jungle, I had the students think of different wild animals. Then, I allowed them to draw from their imagination a jungle. I asked them to draw at least one wild animal as a foreground for their drawings.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

One exciting activity me and my students did in my third grade art class is making free form shapes from geometric shapes. I found this very exciting activity in Ms. Kathy Barbro's blog: http://artprojectsforkids.org.

Procedure:1) Using a pencil, draw different kinds of geometric shapes- circle, triangle, square, rectangle, etc. You can overlap the shapes.2) After the pencil shapes are drawn, they are to be colored in with a NON-permanent, waterbase marker. This is the time to use those cheap, fat store markers as you actually will be wanting the colors to bleed.3) Drop several puddles of water on your artwork with a brush or dropper. If they pick up the paper and roll the water around a bit, it should start to make lots of colored streaks and blobs. Repeat this until almost all of the artwork is filled with wiggly colored lines. Let dry.4) Once it is completely dry, trace all the organic shapes that were made from the running water. You need to work slowly to trace all the wonderful edges you see, both inside and outside the colored shapes. The more time you put into the tracing, and the more detail you see, the better your artwork will look.

This is an interesting activity to let kids practice drawing contour lines.

Materials:1) bond paper2) colored markers3) crayons

Procedure:1) Look at pictures of different kinds of leaves.2) Draw leaves of different shapes. Fill the paper with at least 3 leaves facing different directions.3) Color the leaves with different colors. It doesn't have to be all green.4) Lastly, trace the leaves around with colored markers, following the edges of the original and expanding as they proceed. As the shapes grow, they will eventually bump into the other leaf shapes and you will have to decide which ones are in front and which are in back.